Canadia

So my adventures around the world have officially begun before I began this ol’ blog thang, earlier this year, with my traveling companion extraordinaire Jill Henkel/to Canadia, home of the freeze, land of the grapes.

The occasion coincided with February 14th, which coincidentally rummied alongside a little known holiday wearing a nametag labeled “Hello, my name is Valentine’s Day” but on more official documents labeled St. Valentine’s Day. Also, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the hyphen-happy little villa we stayed in, they were celebrating Days of Wine and Roses, which sounded like a sparky ol’ jovial time to me on the way up, though we later realized that it meant not much in a town where the latest shoppe is open only until just past 5:15. A lovely locale, really, but for hearty wanderers such as ourselves, we needed some substance, something more dirt and gritty, a place that might actually have a population of homeless people.

So we gathered ourselves in a local bar and asked around, discovering that while you weren’t able to smoke inside any public place in the Niagara region, there was a little diddy of a shuffle that you could make by motorcar and find yourself arrived in a small city known as St. Catherine’s. Blah blah blah blah blah. My story goes too long and so I’ll make the point snappy and clean: we stopped in a wee coffee shop where our waitress wore her hair in silly sexy beads and lanked her way over to deliver us our ordered drinks, chai for the lady and some sort of green tea with the word “dragon” in it for this rag tag exchange for a gent. After pursuing her interests we discovered that a little place known as the NAC would be having a cheesey high school dance sort of blast and we should stop in.

So we did.

At first site it was too 10th grade for reality, and no one was there yet, so we turned tail and found the second of two bars that you could actually smoke in, where we played pool with some friendly Canadians who were adament about the fact that “the States” were a bore and Canada had the cheap weed, which I found entertaining that people might think of me as the sort to partake in such events. They generally tended to say things like, “Oh, you’re from the States? Well, that’s okay with me, but they’re a bit of a drag. I do like the (insert hockey team), though.” Stereotypes are a beautiful thing. Roundabout storytelling and all, we got back to the NAC and there we met a happy bunch of misfits who called themselves (though not to our face) the Suitcase in Point. They invited us to a private showing/critique the next day of a play they had written, starred in and produced called “Be Wearing Wolf,” a truly wonderful display of insanity and humor all wrapped up into a flabbergast of intellectual hilarity. And you can quote me on my hairdo if I’m wrong. So check out the website and then go to Canada on your next lunchbreak via your local magnetic train. Ta-ta.

Up Next: here we go round the mullberry bush